Teaneck Keeps Denying & Delaying Legitimate Information Requests
And the courts keep forcing it to change those bad decisions

Three times of late, Teaneck has gone to court to defend its decisions about what public records documents it 1) has released or not released; 2) to whom and 3) how quickly it is responding to requests for those documents — and three times it has LOST.
And its lawyers have lost so completely that the judges have awarded fees to their opponents – that is, to the attorneys for the seekers of denied OPRA documents.
So Teaneck taxpayers have to pay not only our own municipal attorneys — but the fees of the Township’s adversaries.
What about getting adequate and competent OPRA response capability to the Clerk’s office so that the Clerk makes legitimate records release decisions. Surely, that would cost less that going to court and then forking over our taxes to attorneys on both sides?

But there is another possible explanation – is what Teaneck’s government has been doing, and/or what the public record documents would reveal, so damning that the Township’s officials will keep going to court just to try to keep the information from getting to us?  Surely in 2016 the court caught the Township making the lame excuse to the Record that releasing any health waiver information would violate privacy protections – even though the Record’s request involved no such protected information whatsoever. But the public – and the Record of that  time knew that Teaneck had been regularly making health waiver payments to ineligible employees.
In that “waiver OPRA” case, the court issued its decision for the plaintiff [the Record] on the same day that the case was argued – and ordered the Town to pay the Record’s attorney fees. We now know that illegal health waiver payments cost us millions of taxpayer $!
Late this summer [2018] a highly-respected judge wrote her decision just two days after a 7/26 hearing. No, the judge said,Teaneck you can’t just keep asserting a right to extend the time before you release the documents. Judge Bonnie Mizdol, the key assignment judge for the Bergen County Superior Court, minced no words in her decision.   click here